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Let’s Talk About Death

The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.

As medical science has proven, death is hard to avoid. But it was especially hard this week.

And not just awful, actual death, of which there was plenty — droves of Somalia’s famine-ravaged refugees or Kenya’s desperate gasoline scavengers dying in a storm of flame — but also theoretical death, possible death, death to come. Death as a policy point. Death as a matter of discussion or partisan debate, or punishment for transgressions as morally clear as murder or as murky as not having health insurance.
Put simply, a lot of time was spent this week discussing whom it was and was not O.K. to kill — or perhaps just let die. To start, there was the high level debate within the Obama administration on just what sort of Islamic militant they would be allowed to kill in Yemen and Somalia (terror plotters, sure, but are foot soldiers O.K.?). Matters closer to home included a torrent of petitions against the planned execution of an inmate in Georgia, Troy Davis; his case has become a celebrity cause, with advocates like Desmond Tutu, Pope Benedict, Bianca Jagger and the Indigo Girls (you got that right) among the petitioners. In Texas, the execution of Duane Buck, a man convicted of double-murder, was halted today, after Buck had already eaten his last meal, because of questions of racial bias in his sentencing.

And notably, those who saw last week’s “Texas death penalty cheer” — in which Rick Perry’s role in Texas’s execution rate was roundly applauded, twice, by an audience at a Republican debate — and judged it an aberration were proven wrong on Monday when something strangely similar happened at the CNN-Tea Party Express Republican debate (full transcript here).

In a column that generated much discussion, The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson described the scene:

The lowest point of the evening — and perhaps of the political season — came when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul a hypothetical question about a young man who elects not to purchase health insurance. The man has a medical crisis, goes into a coma and needs expensive care. “Who pays?” Blitzer asked.

“That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul answered. “This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody. . . .”

Blitzer interrupted: “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

There were enthusiastic shouts of “Yeah!” from the crowd.

“You’d think one of the other candidates might jump in with a word about Christian kindness,” Robinson wrote. “Not a peep.”

To be fair, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple rightly points out, the response was more a like a few jeers, nothing compared to the full-throated chorus at the first debate. Still, Perry himself confessed to being “taken back” by it.

That almost made him seem, well, sensitive.

Which raises the question, when you kind of shock a guy who doesn’t flinch at executions, what exactly is going on in the bleachers?

In his column, Robinson asked, “Where are the compassionate conservatives?” (As though we were lousy with them only weeks ago.) “According to the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus told the Pharisees that God commands us to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’ There is no asterisk making this obligation null and void if circumstances require its fulfillment via government.”

To which Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway responded: “Of course, there is no addition to Christ’s statement along the lines of ‘therefore, thy must support massive government spending programs,’ either.”

Clever retort, that. But Mataconis actually puts time and thought into a more thorough rebuttal to Robinson’s position.

Perhaps there are situations where only government action can address a situation. In this country, we’ve more or less got a social compact that accepts the existence of a basic safety net for the indigent that enjoys wide popular support. However, Robinson wants to go further than that, his basic argument that the only charity that matters is government “charity” and that opposing government action to “help” the poor is equivalent to hoping that they die. This is, with all due respect to Robinson, an utterly ridiculous example of the kind of close-minded thinking one sees far too often from political pundits. Agreeing that the poor should be helped is where the compassion comes in. Disagreeing about how that should be done does not make one uncompassionate,…

At Cafe Hayek — that’s after Friedrich, not Salma — Robinson received a suitably skeptical response from Don Boudreaux, who asks a good question::

I don’t get it. Why is Robinson’s call to force Smith to care for Jones an exhibition of compassion, while Paul’s endorsement of arrangements under which Smith voluntarily cares for Jones a display of heartless indifference to the plight of others?

Reasonable people can disagree over whether or not voluntary charity would be sufficient. It’s a mistake, however, to classify coerced “giving” as “compassion,” and downright bizarre to accuse those of us who would rely more upon genuine compassion — evidenced by people giving from the goodness of their hearts rather than from a desire to avoid imprisonment — as endorsing a society without compassion.

Is it true, as our colleague Paul Krugman wrote, that “compassion is out of fashion,” that “lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.”

Andrew Sullivan delves into the issue, but can’t quite shake his distaste for the behavior of the audience:

Of course, even if such libertarian purity does make sense, that cannot excuse the emotional response to the issue in the crowd last night. Maybe a tragedy like the death of a feckless twentysomething is inevitable if we are to restrain health care costs. But it is still a tragedy. It is not something a decent person cheers. Similarly the execution of hundreds, while perhaps defensible politically and even morally (although I differ), is nonetheless a brutal, awful business. You don’t delight in it. And the same is true of torture. Even if you want to defend its use in limited circumstances, it remains an absolute evil, no humane person would want to do it, and no civilized person would brag of it or dismiss any moral issue with it at all.

At Outside the Beltway, Steven L. Taylor concurs, adding a little disdain for Paul’s response, which, while not as unforgiving as the peanut gallery’s, was hardly a model of compassion:

[L]ike Sullivan, I find the lack of introspection on these issues as displayed by some to be disturbing. This was my reaction to Rick Perry’s all too calm response to the death penalty question from last week’s debate and I feel the same way about Pauls’ response to Blitzer’s question about the uninsured. Purity about justice and liberty (respectively) make for great slogans and debates over drinks, but reality is a tad bit more messy than that. And while what one can extrapolate from audience outbursts is limited, the cheers from the debate crowd in both instances are likewise disquieting.

Joe Conason at RealClear Politics pointed out that the nation’s health care situation is a threat to a population much more real than Blitzer’s hypothetical man:

Lack of insurance — and the lack of adequate insurance — present a daily concern for increasing numbers of Americans. According to the Census Bureau, the exact number has reached 49.9 million, the highest number since the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and the highest percentage of uninsured Americans since the recession of 1976.

The consequences are tragic and — although financially costly to American society compared with other advanced countries — go far beyond mere money. Being uninsured means foregoing necessary care, especially preventive care, which annually causes the premature deaths of at least 50,000 people.

The Republicans up on that debate stage and the tea party claque don’t think this is their problem. They don’t care. They must be the only Christians in the world who would cheer wildly at the idea of someone dying from lack of health insurance.

While there have always been some odd characters attracted to power, it seems we’re dealing with a whole new category of crazy, something we’ve never encountered at the highest levels of our politics before.

This year we had a GOP figure candidate rise to the top of some polls by claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He was replaced briefly by someone who has accused the President of trying to set up mandatory, Communist-style re-education camps for youth. She’s been replaced by a guy who calls Social Security a giant fraud.

Something has changed. Facts are elitist. Credibility is evolving into a liability and crazy has become a tactic. Where is this coming from?

Ladd goes on to attribute it to, well, the Internet, the proliferation of shiny devices and our new ability to build technological fortresses of self-reinforcing information.

Maybe he’s right. Or maybe it was just something he picked up on the Web.

Correction: September 19, 2011The original version of this article misidentified one of the celebrities supporting the cause of Troy Davis, who is scheduled to be executed in Georgia. It is Bianca Jagger, not Jade Jagger.

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The Thread is an in-depth look at how the major news events and controversies of the day are being viewed and debated across the online spectrum. Compiled by Peter Catapano, an editor in The Times’s Opinion section, the Thread is published every Saturday in response to breaking news.